I first saw this cruddy little cheapie back in the late 70's when it played on a double bill with 'The Savage Bees' at my local flea-pit.
Being an impressionable teenager, I was 'blown away' by all the blood, guts and goo on show, and left the cinema believing i'd just witnessed a sci-fi horror masterpiece.
Thirty years later, I purchased the DVD and sat down to watch it with my partner. Thirty minutes later, we realised this particular 'Melting Man' should have been left dead and buried in the 1977 trashcan he winds up in along with my rose-tinted memory.
For what it's worth, an astronaut on a space mission flies his craft too close to the sun (or something) and returns to earth to embark on a rampaging trail of mutilation and murder whilst layer after layer of skin melts off his bones. And that's it.
Production values are rock bottom, the direction corpselike, the editing looks like the work of a visually impaired person using their teeth and the acting is uniformly awful which, when all is said and done, at least gives it some consistency.
Rick Baker's Melting Man make-up fx seemed awesome at the time, but now the title character just resembles someone that looks like they fell into a vat of Ben & Jerry's chocolate ice-cream.
And even though it's still the best thing in the movie, the scene with a severed head bursting open at the bottom of a waterfall, is nowhere near as graphic as I remember. But hey, that's memories for ya.
Being an impressionable teenager, I was 'blown away' by all the blood, guts and goo on show, and left the cinema believing i'd just witnessed a sci-fi horror masterpiece.
Thirty years later, I purchased the DVD and sat down to watch it with my partner. Thirty minutes later, we realised this particular 'Melting Man' should have been left dead and buried in the 1977 trashcan he winds up in along with my rose-tinted memory.
For what it's worth, an astronaut on a space mission flies his craft too close to the sun (or something) and returns to earth to embark on a rampaging trail of mutilation and murder whilst layer after layer of skin melts off his bones. And that's it.
Production values are rock bottom, the direction corpselike, the editing looks like the work of a visually impaired person using their teeth and the acting is uniformly awful which, when all is said and done, at least gives it some consistency.
Rick Baker's Melting Man make-up fx seemed awesome at the time, but now the title character just resembles someone that looks like they fell into a vat of Ben & Jerry's chocolate ice-cream.
And even though it's still the best thing in the movie, the scene with a severed head bursting open at the bottom of a waterfall, is nowhere near as graphic as I remember. But hey, that's memories for ya.